Stories To Save The World? Exploring Contemporary Climate Fiction Narratives and Climate Fiction Writers' Voices: a Feminist Socio-political lens

Editors: Teo, Y., Alexander, J.

Conference: Bournemouth University

Publication Date: 11/12/2025

Pages: 1-330

Abstract:

The Paris Agreement (2015) signified international political consensus that fossil-fuel burning causes global warming, and must be reduced. Yet a decade later, politicians have failed to acknowledge or adequately address the now irreversible global climate crisis. In contrast, the cultural sector engages with the climate crisis through Climate Fiction, which engages the environmental imagination (Thornber and Lu 2018). In The Great Derangement (Ghosh 2017), Ghosh made a call-to-arms to Western authors, imploring them to convey the harsh reality of climate change, and acknowledge the history of global economic expansion, critiquing literature written throughout Modernity, particularly Victorian novels which foreground personal emotions. This research considers the content and role of contemporary Climate Fiction, in the context of global environmental collapse. Employing ecocriticism, by nature political (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, Garrard 2019), as is the feminist lens, it firstly examines the content and efficacy of six contemporary econovels, including those written by women, and women of colour, employing intersectionality (Merchant 1980, 2006). It finds that although Climate Fiction depicts the horrors of the climate crisis, it lacks the ability to convey new sociopolitical imaginaries, because pro-environmentalism is oppressed. Secondly, this unique research hears the voices of contemporary writers-as-activists, to understand why they write, and how they engage with the climate crisis through extra-textual activities, finding they encounter anti-environmentalism in multiple ways.

The history of ecocriticism is outlined, and how large-scale environmental tropes are used to convey or mask environmental degradation. Garrard’s (2019) eco-philosophical positions are used to create a new, unique sociopolitical framework, consisting of three pairs of oppositional forces, in which to analyse the findings. This potentially disruptive (Kerridge and Sammells 1998) research concludes that powerful anti-environmental forces in our society i.e. Capitalism, Anthropocentric Environmental Scientism, and Patriarchy, quash the less powerful pro-environmental forces of Ecosocialism, Biocentric Activism, and Ecofeminism, respectively, in Climate Fiction, and in real-life.

This research framework makes an original contribution in that it proffers an explanation from the cultural sector as to why the climate crisis is not being tackled effectively, fulfilling the aim of the research, and defending the cultural sector against accusations of social apathy, or lack of sociological imagination (Milkoreit 2017), often made by those in positions of power.

Source: Manual

Preferred by: Penelope Wells